crew, leaning over the looms of their oars, stared and listened as
if at the play. The master of the brig looked up suddenly to ask
me what day it was.

They had lost the date. When I told him it was Sunday, the 22nd,
he frowned, making some mental calculation, then nodded twice sadly
to himself, staring at nothing.

His aspect was miserably unkempt and wildly sorrowful. Had it not
been for the unquenchable candour of his blue eyes, whose unhappy,
tired glance every moment sought his abandoned, sinking brig, as if
it could find rest nowhere else, he would have appeared mad. But
he was too simple to go mad, too simple with that manly simplicity
which alone can bear men unscathed in mind and body through an
encounter with the deadly playfulness of the sea or with its less
abominable fury.

Neither angry, nor playful, nor smiling, it enveloped our distant
ship growing bigger as she neared us, our boats with the rescued
men and the dismantled hull of the brig we were leaving behind, in
the large and placid embrace of its quietness, half lost in the
fair haze, as if in a dream of infinite and tender clemency. There
was no frown, no wrinkle on its face, not a ripple. And the run of
the slight swell was so smooth that it resembled the graceful
undulation of a piece of shimmering gray silk shot with gleams of
green. We pulled an easy stroke; but when the master of the brig,
after a glance over his shoulder, stood up with a low exclamation,
my men feathered their oars instinctively, without an order, and
the boat lost her way.